Are you a texting fiend? I'm not talking to those with mere 400-messages-per-month packages. I mean the folks who truly take advantage of AT&T's unlimited messaging plan. If you fall into the latter camp, the Pantech Slate could be your new best friend. The Slate is a basic, boring-looking phone with one standout feature: the best keyboard for texting that I've seen on AT&T in ages. It's like a BlackBerry for the SMS set.

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Otherwise known as the C530, the Slate is a black, slab-style handset with a big 2.2-inch but relatively low-res 176-by-220-pixel screen and a keyboard of large, bumpy, and very well separated QWERTY keys. You'll find dedicated Camera and Volume buttons on the sides, and a charging port that doubles as a nonstandard headset jack up top. The 3.2-ounce phone isn't a beauty queen, and it's awfully wide (but thin) at 4.2 by 2.5 by 0.4 inches (HWD).

That said, the firm clickiness that the Slate's luscious keys provide makes it the best keyboard of all of AT&T's texting phones. Compared with the Slate, the Pantech Matrix's keys are mushy and the Samsung Propel's are shallow. You can fly on this comfy keyboard, and the relatively simple software on board has no problem keeping up.

The Slate comes with the most basic of SMS/MMS applications: There's no support for threaded messages, as you have on the iPhone. Under a separate menu, you can also get to basic AIM/MSN/Yahoo IM clients and a limited e-mail program. The AIM client shows only your "mobile" buddies, and the e-mail app supports only a set list of ISPs including AOL, Windows Live, and Yahoo (but not Gmail). IM runs in the background, alerting you to new messages; but e-mail doesn't. If you can live with basic, text-only e-mail, the Slate is an excellent budget choice.

For all those social-networking sites you want to hit, the Slate integrates a basic WAP browser. Fonts are clear but rather large, sometimes showing only five lines at a time. I suggest installing Opera Mini instead; the version with the Thawte certificate worked well on our Slate and improved the browsing experience. The Slate's low-res screen still limits your real estate, but you can navigate Twitter and Facebook without a problem. The phone also comes with mobile banking and weather apps.

When you use the Slate as a phone, its reception and volume are generally fine, though I occasionally heard a hiss in the background of calls and experienced some garbled and dropped sound. In addition, the microphone excelled at reducing background noise: When receiving calls, for example, I couldn't hear a truck idling on the other end. Transmissions from the speakerphone also sounded good, though with some wind noise. The Slate's vibrating alert is incredibly strong, and its MP3-quality ringtones are sufficiently loud; you can even use your own MP3s as ringtones. A quad-band EDGE phone, the Slate C530 has excellent battery life: I achieved 11 hours 40 minutes of talk time, which should add up to several days of normal use.

The Slate supports Bluetooth, both in its mono and stereo varietiesthough stereo Bluetooth is pretty pointless on a phone without a memory card slot or enough built-in memory to store music. I also had some trouble with Bluetooth. It took me two tries to pair the device with our Motorola H15 headset, and calls on the H15 had noticeable background hiss. The Slate does connect to PCs and Macs to transfer files via Bluetooth. You can also use it as a PC modem, but since there's no 3G support, speeds top out around 120 to 150 kilobits per second. Pick up the Pantech Matrix if you need a modem in your texting phone.

The 1.3-megapixel camera supports video recording, but neither stills nor video were very good. Simulated daylight photos were okaygrainy but decent. Low-light photos were very overexposed and had serious blur problems. Outdoors, the foreground of a picture was sharp but a bit dim, and a bright sky was blown out. Videos didn't show awful compression, but at 176 by 144, 5 frames per second, they were quite jerky.

If we had a texting-phone category, the Pantech Slate C530 would easily nab our Editors' Choice. Its no-nonsense, efficient operation, coupled with a spectacular keyboard, make tapping away on it a pleasure. The Pantech Matrix is a more balanced multimedia phone and has slightly better voice quality, because it's a 3G phone. But if you text, e-mail, and IM heavily, the Slate is just great.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts...

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